@Juances

Then it's a good thing we're not fighting gremlins in Lockdown!

@Luguiru

The bomb would emit damage from the epicenter just like any other. The reason it can be used to get around shields is that with enough CTR, 2-3 of them can be out at the same time. I set the base damage from looking up Ash of Agni's fire damage and the idea is that the ticks would be no faster than that. DR on the other hand has a pretty hefty rate of fire. Ash of Agni and Magnetic Wave would have separate purposes in that MW would be more active while AoA's effect lingers outside the range and after the duration of its haze.

I've edited the original post to reflect this.

I'll get to the anti-gremlin sword later. :] Edit: Oh right talking about beasts. I have a reason for not appointing flourish to this task.

The Anti-beast sword

The first thing on your mind now is probably "Why make an anti-beast sword? Flourish is perfect for everything!" There are a couple of reasons. First of all, piercing weapons need more variety. There is only one piercing sword, negligible variations excluded, of course. Meanwhile, there are at least four distinct elemental swords. Piercing weapons is also an area in which heavy swords are completely lacking.

Plus, spears are cool.

Beasts are not difficult to fight, but they appear in large groups and teleport around like dogs without Y-chromosomes. The Flourish is vastly overqualified for killing beasts, speed-wise, and as such I think an anti-beast sword should trade speed for coverage and damage in order to kill beasts with more efficiency.

Before presenting the new idea, let's have a look at the current anti-beast sword.

Pitiful. Normal damage! High bonus against beasts, sure, but if you were to gear up in full skolver and equip a Barbarous Thorn Shield that bonus would go to waste. Meanwhile, Dread Venom Striker would output the same damage and also poison the beasts. What kind of anti-beast variant of a sword is outperformed in its own territory by the very sword from which it sprung off?

Easily solved, however! See how the sword is freaking covered with spikes? It should inflict normal/piercing damage. Swords are in the area where split normal/special is actually stronger than pure special, so that would give it an edge over Flourish right there. The movement pattern when using the cutter is as such that you constantly move around the battlefield, subtly but surely avoiding the simple beast attacks, making it ideal for fighting a pack of wolvers.

It's a spear
*** Hunting Spear
**** Hunting Javelin
***** Whale Hunting Harpoon (replace whale with equivalent SK universe creature)
Piercing damage, base damage is identical to Gran Faust and Divine Avenger (241, 338, 545 and 119 on the first hit, second hit, charge attack and charge projectile).

At 3*, this is just a big stick with a piercing blade at the end. The charge attack is a strong stab that inflicts about twice the damage of the regular stab. The line has a two-hit combo similar to the Troika and Sealed Swords, with the second swipe replaced by a stab. One uses the swing to knock back surrounding mobs so that they're clear when using the followup stabbing attack. This stab send the user forward about a tile and a half while the reach of the attack itself is a full three tiles. Width is sacrificed in lieu of length with this heavy sword.

The 4* Hunting Javelin has a rope attached to its end. After charging, the user throws the javelin a set distance (somewhere in the area of 6 tiles). While traveling, the Javelin acts like the charge projectiles from the sealed sword upgrades, with the exception of it traveling much faster in general, and the speed decreasing at the end rather than increasing. It'll land after this set distance hurt enemies for charge damage in a 1-tile radius around the landing point. After this, the spear is pulled back via the rope attached on its back. The spear will once again act as a charge projectile on its way back to the user. The result should be higher damage to targets at the front at the expense of being vulnerable during the charge animation.

The 5* is identical, but it's a giant, metal harpoon and stronger. There's a chain instead of a rope as well. The charge attack for both the Javelin and Harpoon is uninterruptible, mostly for aesthetic purposes.

Wacky bonus idea of the day! (Now with 20% less wacky!)
I'm imaging the spear used to get the enemy's attention. The large are of coverage and damage should make sure of this. But what does a spear-wielder do when confronted with an alpha wolver about to charge into his face? Run?

Hell naw. The followup stab with the spear-line will be the only attack in the game capable of interrupting alpha wolver attacks. Before you're going to suggest anything to the effect this being overpowered somehow, consider that beasts are the weapon's only practical purpose. What else will you use a heavy piercing sword for? Devilites? Greavers? It could maybe see use on Trojans.

You might suggest it's unnecessary since beasts are easy anyway in which case I don't really care. I'm a man with a mission and that mission is designing anti-family weapons even for families where it isn't even remotely needed. Plus, it's a short-sighted way to think. Beasts should be buffed in some manner other than cheaty teleportation to make them somewhat worthy opponents again. And when they are, we'll have just the weapon to fight them with.

Next up: Anti-fiend gun.

@Aureate: I use duct tape, but you could pull it off with rope.

The anti-fiend gun

I've seen a lot of topics suggesting a piercing damage Antigua upgrade. People were complaining about the piercing/shadow variety of it, so they probably don't want to use it for wolvers. One must assume the piercing antigua-upgrades would be used for fiends. I don't think it'd cut the mustard. You could use it, but I think the amount of time Antigua leaves you slowed down and low interruption power would make for a pretty subpar anti-fiend gun. Keep in mind, I've never actually used Antigua or any of its upgrades, although I've seen it used much by my friends.

An anti-fiend gun should:
-Have some interruption capability, to stop Greavers
-Have fast bullets, perhaps even not activate dodging in the same manner Callahan does in order to hit dodging Devilites
-Interfere as little as possible with mobility, to defend against incoming hails of Devilite furniture
-Be able to inflict lots of damage during a small window, so that killing Trojans can be done in a reasonable amount of time
-Be available in 2* format. Gunners do not have any 2* piercing options.

Of the current piercing guns, Antigua fills criteria 2 and arguably 3. Blitz and Plague meets criteria 1 and 4. Callahan meets 1 and 2, We need something in between that can meet all of these criteria.

It's a piercing Blaster
** Staker
*** Super Staker
**** Master Staker
***** Conviction
Piercing damage, base damage of 108 at depth 25, the charge projectiles do the same.

It's a gun. It's gun that shoots swords. The Staker is similar in form and function to Blaster. A stake can be seen poking out of the barrel, and the Conviction has an attachment underneath that looks like it might be able to shoot grenades or something but actually does nothing.

The biggest differences between Staker and Blaster is
a) The knockback has been traded out in exchange for not triggering dodge-happy monsters' dodging.
b) The charge is different. Where Blaster fires one large projectile with enormous knockback, Staker fires a volley of five stakes spread over the same spread as the Thorn Blade Charge. Range, speed and damage of the projectiles is unaltered from the regular shots. The projectiles do more damage than Thorn Blade's, but there are less of them and Staker does not have a swipe attack that deals 500 damage joining in on the fun. This allows the user to spread out damage on a group of enemies or deal high damage at close range to a Trojan. Nowhere near as powerful, but the Staker wins out in versatility.

The Staker does not come with a wacky idea, unless you count dodge-cancelling as wacky when it's more like a required feature for a piercing gun.

Next up: An underused gun receives a make-over as I split a branch of from it to become an anti-construct gun.

"Hey whoa there", I hear you say. "A gun? Against constructs? We have million zillion elemental guns already!" That may be true, and I'm not filling a very large anti-construct gun shaped hole here, but I'm filling one nevertheless. Polaris will stop turrets in their tracks and when used right will push those enemies away but maybe you want to kill things... faster? Some constructs carry a load of health on them and you may want something stronger. Antigua is a DPS gun, but it won't stop turrets and if you want to constantly fire it you'll have trouble dodging all the bullets coming your way. There's alchemers, though! Alchemers work. Like haze bombs and brandishes, I believe Alchemers are intended as a general purpose support weapon, but at the moment they sort of just one-hit-kill enemies and inflict huge damage on groups. Maybe internal ricochets will be fixed someday? Maybe Alchemers get replaced by, I dunno, potion guns that shoot bird poop-shaped globs that give little reward for an absurd amount of risk. Who knows!

An anti-construct gun should have the following properties:
-Excel against crowds, such as mecha knights chasing you in an arena
-Be able to interrupt turrets
-Allow for mobility while dishing out damage as mecha knights are fast and puppy shots plentiful

It's a poorly disguised post on how to fix Catalyzer
** Catalyzer
*** Freezing Catalyzer
**** Biting Catalyzer
***** Crystalizer

Elemental damage, wiki is pretty incomplete on it and I'm too lazy to go to depth 25 and check it out for myself but base damage values are identical to Biohazard.

Directly inspired by this post, so thanks to Dagunner and Quotefanboy! There's also a couple of threads on how to make Catalyzer stand equal to to the Pulsar, so also thanks to Jester-Gtr and Gametrekker. I also checked out Luguiru's thread literally just now to see if he had any Catalyzer-balancing suggestions, and noticed there was an index-entry for a freezing Catalyzer that doesn't link to anything yet.

Using a Catalyzer requires a lot of setup. With the regular shots doing no knockback, and the charge attacks not doing anything at all before you blow them up, you need a lot of herding to set up multiple charges. The payoff for setting up multiple charges versus just one is that the enemies will usually be more gathered in the end and thus you should be able to kill a crowd more efficiently. The problem with this is that since you'll be shooting the charges at a crowd, they're very likely to land on different targets. It sometimes look like charges chain eachother, but that's actually just your regular attack hitting two enemies at the same time.

Charges should chain eachother. I also think that a charge should be able to activate other charges a bit further than its damage radius; maybe a tile or so. That's mostly it. With elemental damage and charging working as one really should expect it to, the Freezing Catalyzer should be pretty ideal against constructs or many varieties.

Wacky suggestion of the day

Freezing Catalyzer would not explode; it would implode. The distinction may seem pointless at first: Let's say you have an orbiting charge currently at an enemy's 3 o'clock. With an explosion, the enemy would fly to his 9 o'clock. With an implosion, he'd fly to his 3 o'clock instead. Nothing seems different. But wait! What if he's surrounded by other enemies? With an explosion, all the surrounding enemies would be spread to all winds, but with an implosion they'd all be gathered up ready to take more pummeling.

This is a bit too powerful, I'll have to agree. The intent behind my suggestion is not to have a gun that replaces Vortex bombs, but rather that the explosion of Catalyzer can turn quite lethal if you're using it, say, at a group of mecha knights chasing you in an arena. Especially if you have a lot of charges going and therefore a very limited ability to control the directions things fly in. So let's have an implosion, but a fairly weak one. Enemies would flinch towards the implotions by about half a tile or so. A split second of breathing room.

The suggestion might make more sense on the Toxic Catalyzer. After all, this one already freezes enemies. That's pretty safe already! Have you tried opening your freezer, closing it and then opening it again? If your freezer is an old piece of junk like mine is, your freezer will now be incredibly hard to open! Freezing lowers pressure, and as such it makes sense for a freezing Catalyzer to pull rather than push.

Wackier suggestion of the day

You didn't get one last time, so you're getting two now! A problem with the Biohazard is that half of one of the enemy types it's supposed to be effective against are countering that charge too well. It has problems with shields in a way other weapons do not. Hit a Darkfang Thwacker in the shield with an expanded Polaris shot and you'll push him away. Hit him with a Catalyzer charge and the charge will simply plink away harmlessly.

"Okay", you might say, "then just don't hit the shield!" That's easier said than done, considering how slowly these bullets travel, but what's worse is that even if you get the charge in on a weak spot, it can still be shielded when you blow it up. That's twice you have to hit with the charge! Hardly impossible, but it's too much effort for the payoff. While you're leading slow shots into Thwackers and then timing your next shot so that the orbit is in front of him before detonating, some guy with a Callahan would've just juggled him to death.

The problem runs deeper. Sometimes a shield is not just a shield. Gremlins healer shields are MEANT to be attacked. They'll break faster if you whack away at them, but with Catalyzer, your primary attack isn't even available.

The suggestion is something I mentioned in a different post. Make charges stick regardless of whether the enemy was shielded or not. Now I only have to hit the enemy once with the charge, and it's more related to timing than positioning. It would essentially flip the Catalyzer's weakness to shields into a strength against shields. Maybe even too much?

Here's what one would theoretically be able to do with the Catalyzers if they could stick to shields:
-Load charges onto a mecha knight. The knight would shield like an idiot until you're ready to detonate. If implemented along with the implosion idea earlier, the mecha knight would also fly backwards instead of straight into your face when you do this. This is mostly what made me think of implosions, actually! I don't find this particularily unbalanced as mecha knights don't come alone most of the time and they have no right to take an annoying amount of time if they do.

The same could be done with Trojans.

-Load charges into a large group of gremlin Thwackers without worrying that the charges will simply disappear. Nothing overpowered about this.

-Stack charges on a gremlin healer within a shield. When the shield dissipates, unleash instant death. Unique advantage over other weapon. Personally I find it needed.

-Stack charges onto Roarmulus Twins while waiting for them to get exposed. Right now catalyzers really suck against enemies with exposed weak points only some of the time for much of the same reasons bombs do. The difference is that while bombs can be planted anywhere at any time, you can't plant Catalyzer charges until the enemy exposes themselves.

Yes, this would allow you to take down the twins is in the minimum of 5 exposings very easily, but you know what? That was always pretty easy! Just bring a Calibur or a Pepperbox or something and everyone whack away. Most of the time in this fight is spent waiting for one twin to get in the middle lane the other not to have broken timing so that the missiles always cancel eachother anyway.

-Do the same with Battle Pods. Since Battle Pod shields can't, as far as I'm aware, be broken by means other than waiting and the shields are usually up for painfully long times, this is the only area where Catalyzers would now have an enormous advantage over other weapons.

Honestly, though, who gives a crap about Battle Pods? I don't.

-Break Spiked Wheel launchers from the front. Most (all?) guns are already capable of doing this, with the sole exception of that first room in Blackstone Bridge where there are three wheel launchers spread to the sides and you have to move the six statues onto the six buttons. This is just one room. It's early on and it's not like it's any difficult.

-Stack charges onto Snarbolax while waiting for him to get over to the stun bell.

THIS one I'll give can be overpowered. It would become the Blitz Needle of Snarby runs.

Reasonable suggestion of the day

Maybe charges can just explode at reduced knockback and damage if it hits a wall or shield?

Next up is an anti-undead bomb.

From eyeballing that stats on Fang of Vog and Leviathan, Fang would just outshine it. We already have Acheron doing the exact same dam- Make that higher damage than what Levi is doing on its regular attacks. What would you get a shadow-damage Levi for? The charge? Fang of Vog is better there, and it's not like Acheron has a bad one, either.

But it leaves you very, very vulnerable. You're also not likely to hit upon a set which protects against both stun and poison, meaning one would have to go to extreme lengths in order to use the sword optimally.

I'm open to suggestions on changing the concept in place, but I feel like straight up making it a weak shadow-calibur is taking it too far. Maybe lowering the base damage somewhat, removing stun infliction but keeping stun receiving, keeping the chance of receiving fire or just straight up have a chance of receiving damage.

@Luguiru

Sounds fair. It would make more sense for the damage to be shadow, and would also increase the risk of using it seeing as you'd never use the sword on enemies dealing shadow. Too much?

@Krakob

FSC, Gloaming Wildwoods and graveyards. LoA is a graveyard.

Anti-Construct Bomb

The ideal construct bomb carries similar properties to our ideal construct gun:
-Excel against crowds, such as mecha knights chasing you in an arena.
-Be able to interrupt turrets. In the case of bombs, it's a bonus if the radius is as such that you could hit two turrets with it at the same time in typical two turret-situations, such as the third room of arenas or certain rooms in Royal Jelly Palace.
-Allow for mobility while dishing out damage as mecha knights are fast and puppy shots plentiful. That means bombs slowing you down such as Big Angry and Electron Vortex are out for this purpose.
-Crowd control is crucial. I'd bring a Voltaic Tempest or Stagger Storm over a theoretical elemental/neutral Dark Briar Barrage for most construct situations.

I have most of the ideas presented in this thread thought out far in advance. There are four arguably overpowered concepts I had thought up specifically for dealing with the four main bosses. The shadow-damage Fang of Vog in the last post was one of them, and most likely the least over-the-top of them. The concept in this one is the one I feel personally is the most exploitable and overpowered of them all. I kind of like it, though! Is there any way we can strike a balance between having this feature present on the bomb without nerfing it to uselessness? Let's try!

Wacky suggestion of the day: This bomb

** Blast Bomb
*** Deconstructor
**** Heavy Deconstructor
***** Scrambler

Elemental, base damage is identical to that of Heavy Deconstructor with the exception that damage goes slightly upwards in Stratum 6 rather than down. Deconstructor and Heavy Deconstructor are also changed to be elemental. The line in general also has construct damage bonus bumped up to Very High, just like shard bombs.

Good chance of inflicting moderate Target Override. <--- This is the possibly overpowered part.

All properties of the bomb remain identical to Heavy Deconstructor. So for most intents and purposes it carries the same effectiveness as a 4* bomb up until the moment it's used on constructs.

Target Override is a status every enemy except constructs are completely immune to. When affected, the enemy's attention is directed solely and completely towards the player who planted the bomb, and all other players are effectively invisible to them. It lasts for about 5 to 7 seconds, leaving the player little else to do if they hope to consistently keep the enemy's attention.

Roarmulus would not be immune to Target Override either, and one could use this bomb to decide the next lane they would fire at. This could be painfully limited (the status would have to be inflicted during their exposed phase), or lolserifically simple (bomb would be able to target override even an invincible Roarmulus).

Subtle suggestion of the day
***** Gigaton Deconstructor

An elemental Nitronome with somewhat less base damage and a Very High versus constructs.

Next up will be the anti-beast gun. It'll be ridiculous.

@Everyone regarding Poacher

The Poacher looks as if its base damage should be marginally higher

The damage just might be a bit too low though.

but lower its damage from 240 on the basic shot to around 220.

I knew this would happen. Sounds like I hit a balance, to me!

Anti-Undead Gun

Let's look at- oh screw it:
-Autoguns are perfect for undead.
-Yes, even spookats.

Undead are slow, easily baited and eat up tons of damage, so you want an autogun. I know you're thinking "Oh okay, it's an elemental autogun, big whoop. I'll check back tomorrow", but give me a chance to elaborate here.

It's a holy water cannon
** Autogun
*** Rain Gun
**** Storm Gun
***** Silver Lining

Elemental, about 60 base damage. Charge does about 200.
Very High against Undead
Fair chance to inflict moderate Divine Fire

You may want to point out that the base damage should be lower than Volcanic Pepperbox for various reasons, but I assure you there is a very good reason I didn't. I'll get to that in a second. It handles exactly like an elemental Pepperbox (not a needle shot, this is crucial!) in terms of speed and interruption. Knockback should be about the same, but I'd have to use the pepperbox to know if its regular attack has reliable knockback for survival.

Wacky suggestion of the day

Divine Fire works just like regular fire with a few differences:
-Only undead can catch Divine Fire.
-That means it cannot spread to players or other enemies.
-Fire-themed undead can catch Divine Fire.
-It's blue!

I'm undecided on whether or not Divine Fire should be able to stack up with regular Fire. The point is moot for the most played undead-themed level anyway. What I am sure of is that Divine Fire should still break free frozen enemies.

The wackiest suggestion of the day

The Rain Gun line's charge attack is both the reason you would get the gun and also the reason why you would never touch the gun with a ten-foot pole and bring Needle Shot instead.

It's a water ball splash.

Go on, chew on that for a moment.

Alright, so here are the effects and ramifications of putting a water ball splash in a weapon. Keep in mind, this is just the splash from when a water ball hits something, not a water ball in itself! That carries with it both advantages and disadvantages:

-First off, you can extinguish teammates. You would not be able to extinguish yourself. (Maybe this should be possible by standing next to a wall and firing into it?)

-Secondly, you can extinguish fire tiles, fire balls and Vana's mask.

-This would let you skip Charred Court, which I don't know why you'd want to do unless you have an elevator pass, and even then. It might be a slightly bigger problem in Darkfire FSC, which I have yet to observe or play. Nothing that couldn't be straightened out by putting some keys and gates there.

-Since it's just a splash, tricks involving throwing a water ball across lengths would not be able to be performed.

The water splash would not be able to put out Divine Fire on undead, but it would be able to inflict it. Damage of the water-splash is otherwise negligible.

That puts an end to the super-wacky weapon mechanics quadrology. Unique statuses and ridiculous charge times will be kept to a minimum from this point out. There is wackiness yet to come, though!

-Next up is the anti-fiend bomb.

Seeing as my suggested weapon would not have the standard autogun charge attack, which is nearly twice as strong as the regular attack per bullet, it would need a fairly strong regular attack to make up for it.

The 200 for the charge attack would be just a single hit. It could be scaled down to the damage I've observed water balls actually do: a mere 8.

If one were to not have the water ball there at all, your numbers would work too.

All damage numbers I post assume neutral targets on depth 25. I've been neglecting to mention so lately.

@Autofire
That sounds like a very specialized reason to craft a weapon. A normal/piercing WHB would probably do you alright against the, what, five lumbers in shadow lair GWW?

And that was a wrap for specific anti-boss weapons. Seerus wasn't included because his own bomb already works on him pretty nicely. Seerus and maybe scorchers are unique in that the existing anti-gremlin bomb is actually fairly effective on them.

Anti-Fiend Bomb

Let's have a look at properties required to be effective against all fiends for a bomb:
-The bomb must detonate quickly to interrupt greavers.
-The bomb should detonate slowly so that Trojans can have their backs baited into them. It should deal high damage within a small area to deal with them.
-The bomb should be able to cover a lot of ground at the same time to hit devilites. It could deal low damage, but over a large area so that it can deal with many devilites at once.

Whoa there, those points seem to contradict eachother, don't they? How can a bomb explode both quickly and slowly? How can a bomb both do large damage in a small area and low damage over a large area? (If you just thought "Hey wait a minute, I know the answer to that last one!", you win my sympathies. I miss her too. :[ )

Let's have a look at our current options.

-Dark Briar Barrage can be used against greavers with a little bit of kiting, blocking, circling and elbow grease. If it detonated just a tad quicker it'd pretty much be perfect for devilites and greavers. As it stands, it's merely very, very good against them. It works nicely on trojans in terms of fuse time, but it would be nice to damage them faster.

-The old Radiant Sun Shards was perfect for greavers. It didn't detonate slowly, bu you could use it like one would a sword or a blitz needle to take them out quickly. Because it covered a lot of ground, (one could even say it created a large area of damage!) devilites could be dispatched with relative safety. Even if you didn't hit them most of the time, you'd keep them dodging rather than throwing spears after you. With proper kiting, one could kill devilites with relative ease.

Once again, old Radiant Sun Shards proves to be perfect against the enemies for which it was designed.

-New Radiant Sun Shards... The initial blast takes the same time to explode as a Dark Briar Barrage, but covers only a fraction of the area, making it much, much worse against greavers. It's possible to bait a trojan into the shard-ring so that his back will be hit no matter which direction he faces, but it takes careful calculation of his dashing-distance as the bomb cannot be planted close the trojan himself without shards disappearing. When I discovered this, my thought process went something like this:

"Okay, so if I place this bomb here at the exact time using this exact distance, I can have this Trojan come at me from the right angle, avoiding all the ter-" WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT? I'm a bomber! I shouldn't have to be worrying about angles and distances! That's why all our bombs have circles around them freeing us and lockdown enemies from the difficult task of thinking about bomb placement and its effect!

Technically, nRSS has a higher DPS than Dark Briar Barrage, but since you have to pause between bombing to re-bait the trojan, using DBB, Nitronome or even Dark Retribution is faster. Stun bug does nothing to help in this regard.'

nRSS performs adequately on devilites, but stun bug means you'll be dodging double pitchforks.

It's a lagsplotion!
** Splinter Bomb
*** Sun Chains
**** Radiant Sun Chains
***** Flower Power

Piercing, 70 for the blast, 81 for the shards
-Very High versus Fiends.
-Fair chance of causing moderate Stun.
(Nothing has been changed)

Yes, I'm keeping stun. I cannot design a weapon based on compensating for bugs. Obviously I think it'd be atrocious to keep the stun there as long as the bug is present, but ultimately there's nothing wrong with stun being there.

So what's with the renaming? It's to emphasize that this is a chain-bomb. What is a chain-bomb, you might ask? It works like this:

-Initial fuse time is lowered to old RSS time so that the shards are scattered almost immediately.
-Shard fuse time is nearly doubled, to allow for at least five clusters of shards to be out at the same time.
-The idea is to place the bombs so that they are daisy-chained together. When one explodes, all the other chain bombs it touches also does so. You might recognize this as the bomb-equivalent of a catalyzer (which was the gun equivalent of a bomb).
-Obviously this will not work with a hard-coded hit-limit! Have it removed!

Let's look back at our checklist:
-With the short initial fuse, hitting greavers shouldn't be too much work. That's all we need.
-By stacking a lot of Sun Chains on top of eachother, a lot of damage is accumulated when it finally detonates, possibly one-hitting Trojans if you manage to bait them into it. This is at it should be.
-If spread out, the explosion will cover a lot of area with a fairly nice payoff. The biggest problem is that you're stuck dodging devilite hail while waiting for the bombs to go off. I would have to try the mechanic out in practice to know if it'd be worth it over just bringing DBB.

It's now kind of the inverse of current Sun Shards, which is pretty good against devilites but rubbish against all other manners of fiends. (Including Maulos, who is immune to Sun Shards due to the shards stopping short of him. Fix this, please?)

Next up will be the anti-gremlin sword.

Anti-Slime Gun

Good day, class. Today's lecture will be on guns that can kill slimes with efficency. If you recall, these were the properties I described for an anti-slime sword:
-Absolutely not inflict fire or shock, making it unusable against Oilers and Quicksilver. Fire is half-debatable, in that it's useful against Ice Cubes but honestly I'd rather have it not be unusable against Oilers.

-Do a bunch of damage to a crowd.

-Do a bunch of knockback to a crowd.

-Do a bunch of damage to a single target, like a turret or the Royal Jelly.

I will now blatantly contradict two of those properties with this gun!

It's the flaming Polaris everyone's been crying about

** Pulsar
*** Fusing Pulsar
**** Blazing Pulsar
***** Consumer

Shadow, base damage is 84 for basic attack and 108 for expanded shots. Charge also remains at 248.
Moderate chance of causing moderate Fire. Polaris gets nerfed to the same.

Inspired by this post, which is hardly the only one of its kind. Catalyzer gets an elemental counterpart so Pulsar gets a shadow one. Similarily to Freezing Catalyzer, the selling feature on this once again be reverse knockback.

You are permitted to exclaim obsceneties now.

Here's the thing: This is a damage-oriented crowd control gun. The fire is for doing damage. The reverse knockback is for selfless crowd control. What do I mean by that? Polaris is a selfish crowd control gun. You spam that junk, enemies go flying away. You're in the clear. Your teammates may or may not be surrounded by shocked enemies that are too clumped together to shield-bump away. Nice job, hero.

Consumer will be selfless. People using Consumer will be Our Lord and Saviour, turning the other cheek and giving vision to blind kids. Those who learn to use the gun can pull a crowd off from their teammates, still interrupt turrets with ease, gather up enemies and do a lot of damage, pull foes into bomb blast radii, work together with a Polaris wielder to keep an enemy completely in place, and so many other things! Those who do not learn to use it properly... will burn.

The way I imagine this gun being used, primarily, is a technique I just invented called "orbiting". You pop a couple of expanded shots on the enemy. Now you run towards them, turn around and pull them right back again. When performed correctly, the user and the enemy would orbit around eachother like beautiful twin stars. Much like our metaphorical stars, the enemy would also be on fire and eventually explode.

Let's have a look at our checklist:
-It inflicts fire. DO NOT bring this gun to C42. I added fire to the gun for thematic consistency. Poison would be prefered, but Biohazard alreay has that among the Roarmulus guns. Plus, like I said, the fire is debatable. Would I bring this gun to Ice Queen? Yes. Yes I would.

-It will do a bunch of damage to a crowd.

-It does reverse knockback to a crowd. Technically, that's a big no on the checklist. Let's replace this point with "crowd control".

-Not the best at single-target damage, but not the worst. You will not have troubles fighting Polyps. Can be used to pull minis away from Royal Jelly, rather than pushing them into her.

Next up is the anti-construct sword.